Where librarians and the internet meet: internet searching, Social Media tools, search engines and their development. These are my personal views.

July 11, 2015

Since winning the election, David Cameron has put the Investigatory Powers Bill back on the agenda after it was blocked during the coalition. This bill also known as the 'snoopers charter' will compel a communications service provide to collect and retain data about their users. Any organisation that interacts with their users will have to keep this information, even if it's entirely irrelevant to their own business needs. The prime minister said back in January "In our country, do we want to allow a means of communication between people which we cannot read?” He went on; "My answer to that question is no we must not. If I am prime minister, I will make sure it is a comprehensive piece of legislation that makes sure we do not allow terrorist safe spaces to communicate with each other"

It's a nice idea in theory isn't it - keeping us safe. However, this isn't going to work, and in fact this bill would cause untold damage, so let's break it down a little bit. The obvious first step is going to be that companies such as Twitter and Facebook will have to record information on all of your discussions with friends, and to keep this for a period of time. What happens if they don't want to? Are they going to be banned? What about messaging services such as What's App or Snapchat? They are going to have to be banned as well. I'll come back and look at this in a moment, because there's more to come.

What Cameron really means to do is to ban effective cryptography. Now, cryptography either works or it doesn't, you can't have it working 'a little bit'. So what he wants to do is to ensure that companies would have to introduce some sort of backdoor access to their software so that the British government can take a peek if it wants to. This will not work. It won't work because if a hacker knows that there is a backdoor, it will be found - it's absolutely inevitable and it will probably take no more than hours, not even days to do this. We've seen it often enough with other 'secure' data.

Now, if a company is looking after YOUR money for example, and it cannot do so safely, what is it going to do? The obvious answer is to leave the UK, which is what Eris Industries have threatened to do. Now of course terrorists are not going to sit back and just say 'ok, you've got us' they'll start to use better encryption software, encrypt their messages and pass them back and forth across Facebook. Facebook can keep all the data that they want, but it's not going to be of any use to the Government. Consequently the government has to take control of your software to ensure that you can't do this. Logically it's got to be able to look at everything on your computer. Now, you use crypto software all of the time - just look at your browser, and when you see the little padlock symbol, that's encryption. When you check your bank details, when you order something online, when you use PayPal, that's all encrypted.

It's easy to get around of course, since you can simply install a VPN and get access to the data that you want, so the software on ALL computers would have to be redesigned to stop things like that happening - you'd need to end up with an enclosed system like iOS, with every piece of software being checked to ensure that it wasn't concealing encryption software that could be used. We then have 'state run' computers. The next step around that of course is for a terrorist to use something small and powerful like a Raspberry Pi machine. So anyone coming into the country is going to need to be searched to see if they're carrying on. They will need to surrender USB sticks to be checked to ensure that they're not bringing in illegal software. So what about their smartphones? These will need to be checked as well of course.

This brings us back to an earlier point - any software that's on a smartphone that encrypts data that moves between people is going to have to be banned, and this is where the national press are picking things up.

So let's take this even further shall we? In order to have WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger banned, they're going to need to be removed from the Apple and Google stores. Are either of these companies going to be impressed with that idea? I hardly think so. However, let's say that they agreed to it. Your phone would need to be accessed and the apps deleted. When you go abroad however to a non-totalitarian state you could re-install the software. This means that - as already mentioned - your phone would need to be checked when you come back into the UK and illegal apps deleted. Foreign visitors will need to surrender their phones, or delete the offending apps. Can you image how keen a business person is going to be with that idea, knowing that they're going to find it next to impossible to keep in minute by minute communication with their head office abroad? What about tourists? Can you see them being impressed with the idea that they can't snap pictures of where they are and what they're doing to send to their friends back home?

Next, all new apps going into the stores will need to be checked by British security services. Can you imagine how much that would delay getting material into our computers or onto our smartphones? We're going to go straight to third world status in terms of computing.

Ignoring all of that - if you can - let's look at the issue of civil liberty. What is being proposed is mass, continuous surveillance by the government. We would - in effect - have no privacy at all, and that's really something that only totalitarian regimes are inflicting on their citizens. Companies that are not keen on assisting this will in effect have to be banned from the UK; a logical conclusion being that we'd not only say goodbye to Facebook messaging, but to Facebook itself. Now, you may well say that these companies are not going to want to give up their huge markets, but equally, it's going to cost them a lot in terms of outlay to produce broken cryptography which is country specific, and their users are going to be less than impressed.

The insanity of all of this of course is that the government is going to be doing the job of the terrorists for them - making life so much more difficult in the UK. Not only that, any terrorist worth their salt is going to be able to get around these new laws with no difficulty at all. It's only the law abiding, normal computer using individuals who will suffer, because they won't know how to circumvent this. So the honest citizens will be handicapped, and the wicked will remain free to do just what they want.

No doubt that Mr Cameron will say that this isn't what he means at all, and has no intention of banning such apps or messaging services. All this will illustrate however is that he has absolutely no idea what he's trying to do, and doesn't understand the implications of what he is suggesting. Everyone else, from Tim Berners-Lee on down thinks that this is an insane, draconian and anti-democratic concept. And they're right.

May 07, 2015

There hasn't really been much by the way of a search engine for national and regional newspapers for some time, so I thought it would be a good idea to create one. Well actually, several. I have used the Google custom search engine option to create both national and 46 regional/local newspaper (the latter is England only at the moment) search engines.

The National UK newspapers engine is available both hosted by Google and on my own website. This covers papers such as the FT, Times, Mirror and so on. The national and local collection of 384 newspapers is again hosted by Google and on my own website.

I have created individual search engines for cities, regions and counties:

I haven't yet done regional newspapers for Northern Ireland, Scotland or Wales; due to time as much as anything else; this was quite a task to find them and create engines, so I want a bit of a break! However, if there is interest in those I'm more than happy to create them. I'm not entirely sure how robust the Google code is, so if you have any difficulties, refresh the page and try again, and let me know.

January 13, 2015

The Prime Minister is keen to limit your rights to access and use the internet even further. According to the BBC news, he has promised to introduce a 'comprehensive' piece of legislation to close 'safe spaces' used by terrorists. There should be no method of communication that the security services cannot read apparently. This would include Whatsapp, Snapchat, iMessage and Facetime; you know, the kind of thing that many of us use on a daily basis.

This is of course in response to the terrorist attacks that happened last week in France - the insanity of a situation in which he wants to stand up and be counted for the freedom of speech in one country is matched only by his enthusiasm to reduce yours. Now, short of banning these products (which is virtually impossible anyway), he's actually calling for the ability to put a backdoor into them, so that the security services can take a peek at anything they wish, according to Cory Doctorow. Now, if there is such a back door, it's not going to be long before terrorists, or more likely crooks, are going to find a way to get into it; certainly if they know such a thing exists it's only going to be a matter of time, and I would be surprised if it's more than 24 hours, before it's broken. So rather than keep you safer, it's actually going to make your world a lot more dangerous.

Clearly you're not going to be impressed about this, so you're going to want to install safe software, which means downloading it from somewhere like the United States. This therefore means that the government is going to have to block that access as well. It's the kind of thing that various repressive dictatorships try and do - and they haven't managed it either. While he's at it, it's going to make sense to ensure that search engines can't provide you with the information that you need in order to get around these restrictions, so your freedom to search, your freedom to choose what you look at, and even your freedom to even be in a position to consider alternatives is going to be drastically reduced. All in the name of freedom somehow.

What if certain organisations like Facebook or Google are not interested in restricting your freedom in that way? The government is already attacking both organisations, and this will only continue. Does this mean that you won't be able to access Facebook, because the government can't properly track you? And what about your smartphone? All those useful apps that you use to chat to friends and family will either be banned, or can be tapped into at any point by *anyone* with the skill to do it. What about the people from abroad who bring in their smartphones - are they going to have to delete apps at the border, or surrender their phones until they leave?

Are developers going to have to submit their code to the security services to be checked and passed as acceptable for people to use? How is that going to help small companies or individuals who want to innovate and introduce new functionality. How is that going to help Britain led the world?

Cameron is clueless - what's more, he's dangerously clueless. His attempts to bully ISPs into blocking pornography have not worked, as we knew they wouldn't. If he does get into power at the next election I am really worried about our freedom; the freedom that he was so keen to support abroad, and so enthusiastic to kill at home.

November 18, 2014

I don't often write about hardware, let alone non-internet related hardware, but since I've found a really good gadget that has already made a big difference to me, I thought I'd share it. I've been getting a lot of those annoying phonecalls - 'we're not selling anything', 'we just want you to take part in a survey' or 'did you know about the government scheme?', to say nothing of the 'We're Windows technical support' rubbish. The Telephone Preference Service is about as much use as a wet Wednesday on a weekend so I looked around to see if I could find something that was a bit more helpful, and there is. It's a phone produced by BT called the 8500 which blocks up to 100% of nuisance calls.

The way that it works is that you put in a list of your VIP numbers - those friends and colleagues who ring you on a regular basis, or who you are happy to get a phone call from. You can have up to 200 listed if you're really popular. They just come straight through, and your phone rings, just as normal. However, what you can then do is to also bar numbers - such as international calls, and these always get blocked. (With the exception of your VIP list I think). You don't even hear the phone ring; the caller just gets a message saying that they have been blocked. You could also do the same thing for witheld numbers, or from a particular region and so on. For everyone else, you set up a message to say 'Before you get put through, you need to be announced' and the caller has to say who they are. The phone then rings, and you get to hear the name. You can then let them through always or just once, or you can block their number or send them to voicemail.

I have to say that it's a really nice service, and I'm delighted with it so far. You can get 1-4 handsets and they all update from the main phone. I'm sure that there are other devices out there that do a similar job, but this is the solution that I found, and I love it.

(Disclaimer: as with all of my other posts, this is not an advert, nor have I been paid to blog about it, and I'm just a happy customer of the product.)

June 19, 2014

The EU ruling on the right to be forgotten seems to have opened up a rather nasty little can of worms, and I can't see that it's going to be getting any better in the near future. The Supreme Court of British Columbia issued a temporary injunction last week, ordering Google to delete websites not only from the Canadian version of Google, but across the world as well. (The background to this story is about a company that wants to stop a rival selling gadgets that were created as a result of stolen trade secrets. This company wants Google to stop linking to the rival sites - more than 300 of them.)

This is of course an attempt to impose Canadian law on the rest of the world, but it didn't appear to bother the judge in the slightest. It's been suggested her decision was inspired at least partly by the European ruling ordering Google to abide by requests from people to be forgotten in the search results.

So we're entering difficult waters here; could the Russian courts for example rule that Google should delete all of the gay and lesbian sites because they don't like them? What about a Middle Eastern country demanding that Google remove all references to Jewish websites? This whole issue is very quickly turning into a mess - results from search engines are already full of holes for one reason or another, and this isn't going to make searching for content any easier in the future.

There are of course plenty of times when websites have to be taken down because of the material that they have published, but the point here is that it's the website that is targetted, not the search engine. Once the search engine - the pointer to the content is attacked (and I know that's strong language, but I think that it's appropriate), what next? Will libraries have to do the same thing - it's not too much of a stretch to put Google and a library in the same boat here. Thankfully the BBC has already taken something of a stand in their blog "Should the BBC unpublish any of its online content?" I'll quote from the blog: "Today, the BBC is publishing Editorial Policy Guidance about when we remove or amend BBC online content. Essentially, this says that material on the BBC website which is not available for a limited time period will become part of a permanently accessible archive that we are reluctant to remove or change and that we will only do so in exceptional circumstances. We are also reluctant to remove or alter programmes available on BBC iPlayer during the catch-up period."

It's great that the BBC are doing this, but I wonder how long they'll be able to hold that particular line. Don't forget the requirement on ISPs to filter and block content unless requested otherwise - now that this is in place the technology can allow the Government to effectively block what we can see in the UK, though of course, that only works well if you don't know how to get around the blocks. Are we heading towards a two tier system of information delivery, with those who don't understand how to search privately are missing out information from those that do? (Clearly the answer to that is already yes, but it's going to get worse).

What's the situation going to be like for people who decide that they need to archive specific types of content, such as the Internet Archive, aka the Wayback Machine. How about the UK Web Archive? The next step in this process would surely be for courts to demand the removal of that data as well.

And what is the role of the library in all of this? Should we move towards using browsers such as TOR, which protect our privacy, and direct users towards search engines that don't track us? To what extent should we be advising our library members on this issues? If we have a responsibility to find and present information, how far do we actually take that? If we can, for example get content that Canadian colleagues can't, and they ask us for the information that legally they can't get themselves, what do we do?

Now, I've already been criticised for my concerns over the insane European ruling, and I've been called 'shrill' but I honestly think that we're beginning to go down a slippery slope and we're not going to be able to climb back again. This situation is going to happen again and again, with corporates squabbling in the courts and using search engines as the battle grounds, with the people who need the information being the victims. If this isn't a case for a strong public library system then I'm not entirely sure what is.

June 13, 2014

The European Court of Justice has just told the world that they are clueless, inept and embarassingly short of knowledge on how the internet works. As you're almost certainly aware, they have ruled that Google is a data controller” under the 19-year-old European law on data protection, and as such could be required not to display links to information that is “inadequate, irrelevant...or excessive”.

There is no world in which any of this makes sense at all. However, let's break it down into various elements, because it's more fun that way.

Do people have a right to be forgotten? There's plenty of material out there on people which is less than complimentary, and much of it is also wrong. A lot of that data is also historical in nature, but unlike incorrect information that just sits inactive in a book or journal, this information can still remain very active. Take the example of Max Mosley, who was involved in a scandal some time back. For most of us, that particular episode is already forgotten, but if you do a search on Google you may (and I stress the word may) see that Google is giving you auto suggest options which relate to the incident. I'm not seeing them on my searches as you can see:

However, other people may. Now, there's not an awful lot that Google can do about that, since Google reflects what the rest of the world does, and if lots of people write about a particular issue, it's going to pick up on that. The real issue is that the content is already out there and will continue to remain out there, whatever Google does. Does Mr Mosley have a right to some sort of protection? Sure he does, but that protection needs to come from him talking to the original publishers of content, not the people who are providing it. Besides, when I see that material, I can also read the entire story and make up my own mind. So whose rights are more important - his to try and make it more difficult for me to find publically available information on him, or mine, to allow me to easily find that information? You may well have some sympathy with the man, which is fine. How about when we look at other people who are requesting that information about them is removed from Google's indexes, such as people with a criminal past, drunk drivers, sex abusers and so on. Do they have the right to be forgotten, or do I have the right to know that they might be living across the road from me? A lot of the people requesting the 'right to be forgotten' are doing so because of their criminal convictions. In the course of every day life many of those people will have the right to have their conviction 'spent' under current UK law, but that's a rather different issue. So the first point - who has the stronger right?

The 'right to be forgotten' isn't a right at all - since they are NOT being forgotten, just not indexed by Google. It would perhaps be more sensible to call it a 'right to censor material about me that I don't like without actually contacting the original publishers of the data'. Moreover, Google intends to indicate in search results if material has been removed as a result of this requirement. Now - if you do a search for 'Phil Bradley' and Google tells you that it has been required to remove material, isn't the first thing you do going to be to go to another search engine? Or if you can't be bothered to do that, go from google.co.uk to google.com since the ruling only applies to the UK version of the search engine.

Why just Google? As we all know, there are plenty of other search engines out there (and if you need them, I've got a list of over 200 search engines), and although Bing is attempting to create a right to be forgotten feature, that's 2 down, 198 to go. And what about new search engines? Who is going to monitor those? No-one, as far as I can tell. So the ruling doesn't actually work on these grounds either.

Next up - who makes the decision on what is in the public interest, as opposed to an invasion of privacy? It's not going to be the courts. Google is going to create a panel who will sift through these requests, and it's got a number of high profile people on it, but they're not going to be wasting their valuable time doing it day after day. It's going to get passed onto some lowly Google employee who makes decisions based on... well, I'm really not sure. Who is going to represent the public interest? What is the 'court of appeal' over this? Deafening silence.

So we've reached a stage when the European Court of Justice is handing over control of information (or at least partial control) to an American corporate. In what world does this make any sense at all?

So there isn't a single sensible reason for this ruling. This will not protect people, either the ones who want to be forgotten, or anyone else. It's ineffective because it doesn't appear to relate to all search engines, and it doesn't even cover all Google search engine variants. It's an abrogation of control to an unaccountable, unelected body. Insane.

January 15, 2014

In open CILIP Council session today Annie Mauger, CILIP CEO explained that Ed Vaizey is refusing to meet her. Previously the Minister would meet on a regular basis, but he has chosen not to see her, but through his aides has said that he will only accept written contact. Of course, written contact is no contact at all. Annie's viewpoint is that a direct corrolation can be drawn between his attitude and the vote of no confidence that was passed at the last CILIP AGM.

Furthermore, in a CILIP press release today it's revealed that key advice on the Government’s gov.uk website about setting up community managed libraries does not appear to have Ministerial sign-off. Does this mean that Vaizey doesn't know about it, doesn't care, or has specifically chosen to snub the information profession and library campaigners and activists?

What's very clear is that there is a worsening of the relationship between the profession and the minister in charge of libraries. I'm not entirely sure that this should come as any great surprise really - and if anyone IS surprised, they are either hopelessly naive about the workings of government or they have held Mr Vaizey in rather too high regard. We're really dealing now with the politics of the playground, and it's all really rather sad. It doesn't mean that (in theory) no-one in government is listening, since there are other ministers available whose work crosses ours, and of course there is the opposition, but I really can't see this is going to increase our ability to advocate for and on behalf of libraries. We can't force someone to talk to us, even if it is the minister, and he's hardly likely to care if he gets brickbats in blogs or the press over the attitude that he's taking - it would appear that his interest in the library service is limited to the ways in which it can be dismantled as quickly as possible.

So, where do we go from here? Trying to get a minister to intervene when he has a mind not to isn't going to work. He hasn't intervened yet, and he's not about to start now, whatever we do - of that I feel sure. The petitions, campaigns and the like are simply rolling off him like water on a duck's back. The concept that libraries are 'a good thing' - while logical and sensible and accurate - will not work in a political climate that does not value anything except money. And here I'm clear that the 'political climate' is not Tory or LibDem or Labour - it's all of them. The government is happy to cut, and indeed is ideologically inclined to do so. Labour wants to show how damaging the cuts are to communities, and to let libraries go to the wall would in many cases suit them very well - certainly at a local level. Of course at a local level there are heroic efforts being made across party boundaries, but these are few and far between; I do not believe that we can look to any political party to ideologically support libraries.

So what can we do instead? We've seen fantastic efforts by local Friends groups, professional organisations and pressure groups, but perhaps it's time to really start reconsidering our approach. There's a very interesting blog post from the ever marvellous Librarian in Black, Sarah Houghton called 'The wrong love' and it's worth a read if you haven't already. One line sums up her argument "We should be campaigning that “The Library Loves You”…not begging for loving scraps of endearment ourselves." Perhaps it's time to focus less on how much we love our libraries, since I'm not convinced that works. It certainly doesn't seem to work with the people that it needs to work with - the politicians. We need to move the focus away from reading to questioning. Sure, the ALA 'Read' posters are great, but that's a message that we're all familiar with. Libraries help us ask the difficult questions. Libraries support communities when no-one else will. A library can help that small business or enterprise get onto its feet. A library can provide financial information for someone who is struggling to afford to eat - as well as great cookbooks! A library can provide the disengaged and disaffected youths with a place to interact with the rest of the community, to practice their music skills, to create content such as videos. A library can provide those medical books that the GP can prescribe. If we want a blunt message - I have a blunt message - Libraries save communities money. A pound spent on a library isn't a pound wasted, it's a pound invested. If money is all that politicians are going to listen to, we can do that. There's a wealth of information (excuse the pun) on how investment brings money into a community. Maybe our message shouldn't be 'Don't close our library' but instead 'Don't waste money closing libraries'. Some people already use that message, and make those points, but perhaps it's time to try and focus the message that money invested in libraries leads to wealthier and healthier communities. At the very least it will give people pause for thought, and maybe go into their library to find out why. Which isn't a bad thing.

January 13, 2014

Just how much can we tell about someone just using very basic data? I have been playing around with a tool from MIT called Immersion, which looks at very basic information about your emails. I found the tool via an article called 'Think Metadata isn't intrusive?' which if you haven't read it, I would suggest doing so. Basically you give the tool access to your email account metadata—not the content, just the time and date stamps, and “To” and “Cc” fields and it numbercrunches for a very long time (it took 15 hours for it to do mine) before giving you back a series of graphs.

This is the type of information that you get - you can save graphs with or without names, and I've chosen the latter for obvious privacy reasons:

Each circle is a person - and the larger the circle, the more email goes back and forth between you and them. The colours represent groupings; the orange group for example is people closely related to or at CILIP for example. This collection is a total figure of 9.6 years, 367 collaborators and 30,000 emails. Now, if I go back to 2009, before I started working more closely with CILIP, the pattern is very different:

It doesn't take a genius to work out that my work and social patterns have changed dramatically over the three year period - the colours relate to different grouping this time by the way, so the orange now relates to another set of people that I was working with very closely at that period of time.

I can also get other basic details:

and again it's not too difficult to work out some basic information about what I have been doing simply based on the bare minimum details. If I flick across to collaborators it's again very easy to make assumptions about what I'm doing at any given period of time. Obviously it's far easier for me, since we're looking at data about me, so it's an open book, but even if you know very little about me, you can quickly start making assumptions, and they're not going to be too far from the mark, even if you have no idea of the content of my emails.

The idea that the government doesn't want to access the content of your email, but simply have basic details may not - at first glance - be a cause for that much concern. However, it really IS a big deal, and I'd encourage you to consider experimenting yourself. You may of course have concerns about letting MIT have access to these basic details - but then, that's what the UK government want. Think about it.

December 28, 2013

Cameron has been shouting loudly from the rooftops that he wants to protect children and to limit access to pornographic material (while providing little or no help to the people who are actually doing this work), primarily by bullying ISPs into compliance. Well, now we're seeing exactly what's coming out of this; valuable websites providing good and helpful information being blocked. BT have launched their own filter, and it covers a much, much wider set of sites: those that show pornography (and we still don't have a legal definition of exactly what this is), refer to illegal drugs, those that promote self harm, the ability to block nudity, social networking and gaming for example. It's also possible to block access to sex education sites and search engines.

Now, you may well say that there's no real issue with that, but what's also getting blocked are sites such as bishUK, which provides sexual advice to teenagers, and Edinburgh Women's rape and sexual abuse centre which is blocked as 'pornographic'. Sexual Health Scotland, Doncaster Domestic Abuse Service, and Reducing the Risk of Domestic Violence are also blocked. Now, we could write this off as collateral damage - mistakes do occur and they can always be put right. That's true, but it may be too late for some people who need information there and then; saying 'oops, sorry' to an abused person isn't terribly effective. But let's look further - the BT filters supported blocking "sites where the main purpose is to provide information on subjects such as respect for a partner, abortion, gay and lesbian lifestyle, contraceptive, sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy." According to the New Statesman, BT has now removed the words 'gay and lesbian', which is rather too little, too late. Does this mean that filters have changed? The reference was gone overnight, and BT are using a third party to produce their filters, so I'm doubtful that much has changed, other than the wording.

Who created the list of 'gay and lesbian' lifestyle sites? Why? What control is there over such discriminatory organisations, and who thought it was a good idea to do it in the first place? This is not collateral damage - this is a deliberate attempt to block access to perfectly legal and acceptable material. Once there is a process in place to block access to material - of any sort - it's far too easy to extend its use into any subject area. Of course, if it's done by a private company that we can't control, the Government can wash its hands; 'nothing to do with us guv'.

However, there is a vague solution in the form of a Google Chrome extension called 'Go Away Cameron'. This doesn't keep a list of blocked sites, it can simply be activated if and when you run up against a blocked site. Clicking the bookmarklet unblocks the site, allowing you to view it. The extension is a private proxy service, which isn't illegal to use, but it does require a level of trust with the person providing it, since the extension needs to access Chrome's tabs and browing activities, but since just about all of us don't have that many issues with people like Google and Bing watching what we're doing, that's not a real problem. The real problem is a Government that wants to set up an infrastructure that allows state censorship at any level, at any time through the backdoor method of unregulated service providers.

August 24, 2013

There seems to be something of a coming trend for libraries to block access to PayDay loan company websites. Birmingham Council is laughably claiming 'moral' reasons. Manchester is doing the same thing. As is Northamptonshire and various others. These all do seem to be at the behest of the local political masters, rather than (thank God) the Library staff themselves. Sorry - maybe I missed this particular lesson, but when was it deemed acceptable for Councils to decide how people should manage their finances by imposing library censorship. And yes, make no bones about it, it's censorship, plain and simple.

When was providing LESS information regarded as a better thing that providing more? I don't particularly like these organisations, but there are lots of things that I don't like, but that doesn't mean that I should have the right to stop the rest of you looking at something. Sure, I get that they charge ridiculous amounts of interest, but it's perfectly clear on (for example) Wonga's website that if I want to borrow £100 for a week, it's going to cost me £12.89 in interest and charges. It's about as clear as it can get. I can then choose to accept that rate or not. Now, how much is it going to cost me if I want to borrow £100 against my credit card for a similar period of time. I have absolutely no idea, and credit card companies are not exactly falling over themselves to tell me either. What about pawn shops? They decide what they'll offer, and what their charges are, but I don't actually see their websites being banned from library terminals.

Wouldn't it make more sense that instead of banning, blocking, filtering and censoring, we actually did the right thing - to provide access to websites and allowed adults to do what - you know - adults can do, which is *make up their own minds*. By all means, and I'd certainly encourage this - provide a page of content on the library website about ways of getting credit, links to lots of different resources, such as credit unions, banks, other financial institutions, websites that help people manage their money and so on. Because I'm sitting and looking at these articles, and these smug self satisfied politicians, who are in some way 'protecting us' from ourselves. If someone is going to want to borrow money, they're going to do that one way or another, and quite frankly I'd rather that they felt safe and secure enough to do some research in a library to find different deals and options than end up down a back alley somewhere borrowing money from some thug. A library needs to be somewhere that anyone can go, safe in the knowledge that they can use it to research and find what they need. Not somewhere that's making a moral judgement on them, not run by a Council that 'knows best' and not somewhere that seems to imply that censorship, rather than education, is the acceptable way to go.

I get that if you're an employee of one of these Councils there's not much that you can do, because quite frankly, if they're prepared to block, ban and limit access to information, they're not going to take too kindly to their employees thinking for themselves, or God help us - actually criticising the smug, self centred patronising councillors who claim to be working on behalf of the community, but instead are using their positions to impose their own will and bullying attitudes on the rest of us. If you're in that situation, you have my entire sympathy.

I don't like PayDay loan companies. I hate that they have to exist, and I hate the fact that they make money from poor, desperate and vulnerable people. But the solution isn't to limit their access and freedom to information and options, it's to provide them with help. The more we censor - for whatever reason, and however laudable it may initially seem, the more it becomes a sensible way of working, and the more we all, as a society get used to it. And that's a worse crime than charging people thirteen quid to borrow a hundred.